Cornelia Funke
The German author, Cornelia Funke was born 1958 in Dorsten,
Westphalia. Following university, she worked for three years
as a social worker in an educational project, working with
children from difficult backgrounds. Following a
post-graduate course in book illustration at the Hamburg
State College of Design, she worked as a designer of board
games and as an illustrator of children's books.
Disappointment in the way some of the stories were told,
combined with her desire to draw fabulous creatures and
magical worlds, rather than familiar situations of school
and home, she was inspired to write her own stories for
young readers. During her time as a social worker, she had worked with
children from deprived backgrounds and discovered the sorts
of stories that grasped their imaginations. These were the
stories she wanted to write – ones that would appeal to
bookish children and to inspire those children who hadn’t
had yet had positive reading experiences. As a reader, Cornelia has always loved good fantasy,
particularly British fantasy authors such as J. R. R.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, C. S. Lewis Chronicles of
Narnia, and J. M Barrie’s Peter Pan. Cornelia Funke’s own
success is now international, demonstrating the universal
appeal – and power – of her storytelling. Cornelia Funke researches for each novel meticulously. For
example, before writing Inkheart, she researched about
booksellers, book collectors, book thieves and even book
murderers as well as reading about martens and fire eaters.
She then imagined the characters and the places they might
go, writes down plot lines for the first 20 chapters. Then,
and only then - after about six months – she writes the
first sentence. A major novel will take her about a year to
write. She always does her own sketches – in pen and ink
(her grandfather was a famous etcher), she creates a picture
of her own characters to help her write about them. Three of the four novels she has published with Scholastic
are being made into movies – The Thief Lord, Inkheart and
Dragon Rider! Inkspell is her newest novel that will be in
bookstores this Fall!
Cornelia Funke lives in Los Angeles, CA, with Rolf, her
husband of 25 years, their 14-year-old daughter, Anna, and
9-year-old son, Ben (Benjy). They have several pets: two
Icelandic horses, a crazy dog, Luna, nicknamed Looney, and a
very shy guinea pig.
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Series
Books:Inkdeath, October 2008
Inkheart
Hardcover
Inkspell, April 2007
Inkheart
Mass Market Paperback
Inkspell, October 2005
Hardcover
Inkheart, October 2003
Inkheart
Hardcover
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